An open source platform for social impact projects

PhiLance is a platform that individuals and organizations can use to:

• Launch their own social impact project, no matter how big or small that project is (e.g. helping homeless people in your city or finding a wheelchair for a handicapped person in your neighborhood)
• Recruit volunteers and/or freelancers to work on that project. Your project team could comprise of members who live across your street or across the world.
• Manage the project using project management tools provided in the PhiLance platform
• Raise funds for their projects, if required

You can read more about the mission and vision of PhiLance on philance.org

For project documentation refer to the PhiLance Wiki on GitHub

Here are the features that we think need to go into the initial version of the platform. If you have suggestions for other features, please contact the team.

• Client application that runs on browser and mobile devices
• User Management Suite
  • Ability to sign up on the platform as a volunteer or a freelancer and work on projects
  • Ability to sign onto the platform as a project sponsor and post projects
  • Ability to sign onto the platform as an investor and fund projects of interest (phase 2)
• Search Tool to find projects of interest, find people, etc.
• Project management Suite
  • Collaboration tools to enable project members to communicate with one another (text messaging, email, A/V conferencing, file sharing)
  • Project planning and scheduling tools
  • Time tracking tool
  • Project budgeting tool to track project expenses
  • Reporting tool
• Payment Processing Suite for handling payments to freelancers on a project
• Analytics Suite to see KPIs of projects, including measurable social impact KPIs.
• Ratings and Review component to get feedback about projects, project sponsors, freelancers and volunteers
• Fund raising component for project sponsors to raise funds for their projects through crowdfunding and/or contributions from impact investors (phase 2)

• Client web app: ReactJS
• Server side APIs: Node.js

The PhiLance platform is open source and accepts contributions from the public. Please contact us at [email protected] to join our team of contributors.

The company, Philance, Inc. is a Benefit Corporation incorporated in Massachusetts, USA. This is a for-profit social enterprise because we did not want to rely on donations to bring our vision to reality. Even though it is a for-profit enterprise, the software platform is open-source so anyone can contribute, modify, redistribute and use it. This is in line with the guiding principle of the company, which is to be of benefit to the public good.

To get started with the development process, please look at this Wiki page first on how to setup a local development environment on your machine and clone the Philance repo to it.

Copyright 2018 Philance, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"). You may not use this program except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.